Steven Osborn: Nathan, I’m wondering what inspired you to become a hardware hacker. Can you think back to some projects or even a person who inspired you or got you interested in electronics?
Nathan Seidle: It started back in, I think, middle school. My friends and I were trying to program calculator games on the TI83 series, or maybe TI85 series calculators. That was about the same time that I started playing with bulletin board systems [BBS], calling them up and transferring files. I came across a schematic to build a link from a computer to a TI calculator. I also came across a repository of TI calculator games. So I thought, “Oh wow! I’ve got to get these on my calculator, but I don’t have this link.” So I tried to figure out how to build one from the schematic, buying parts from Radio Shack, and managed to get one assembled and plugged into a parallel port. I guess it was an open-source schematic of sorts. At the same time, I managed to cut my thumb pretty good. I still have the scar from building those things. I built one for myself and, because I had all the games, my friends started hooking their calculators up to my calculators to get games.
Osborn: Your guys sell a lot of different things, a broad spectrum of things. Can you tell me about some of the cool projects that your customers have built or are working on that you think are interesting?
Seidle: There’s dozens, if not hundreds, and my memory is pretty poor. The one that often comes to mind is a young man who came into the office. I think he was twelve or thirteen at the time. He wanted to get a tour of SparkFun and he wanted to show off a project he had built. He had taken a series of our flex sensors and had attached them to a glove, kind of like the Nintendo Power Glove. He used an accelerometer to detect the level of his hand, and then based on which fingers were flexed and the tilt of his hand, he could decode sign language characters.
Osborn: Oh, incredible.
Seidle: Yeah, and so he piped that into an LCD display, so he could actually sign characters and have it print out. Eventually, he sent that to what’s called a speech jet, which is a voice synthesizer. So he could sign stuff, and then after a couple of seconds, his device would start talking. It was at that moment that.
Osborn: Can you talk a little bit about open-source hardware? What it means to have open-source hardware, and what it means to you?
Seidle: Way back in the day, when we had some of the first products that we released, they were little breakout boards. Actually, it was an accelerometer on one side and a PIC microcontroller on the other, and all this little device did was convert the accelerometer values to a serial signal, so that you had a serial accelerometer. This was the easiest protocol, so people liked it. The problem was that SparkFun was just me at that time and I couldn’t really handle the tech support. I was really worried that folks would want to change certain aspects of the product and I wouldn’t be able to do that. I wouldn’t be able to help them. So I decided in that moment to open up that product, in whatever year it was—’04, ’05—and say, “Okay, here’s the schematic. Here’s the firmware. If you want to make changes, go for it.” At that point in time, there was no concept of open or closed. It was just like, “Here’s this thing. We want to share. Do whatever you want with it.” As time went on, it became more and more obvious that folks were learning from our designs, so that the more we shared, the faster our customers learned and the more stuff they needed from us. It was beneficial to us to share everything that we developed. In the last couple of years, the open-source hardware movement has turned into a significant thing, and I’m really pleased with it from two aspects. One of them is making humanity better. By sharing these things, you fulfill the human need to learn from each other. If I learn a hard lesson here, let me share this hard lesson with you so that you don’t have to go through that same pain. That works really nicely with hardware. There’s a lot of “gotchas” that can be avoided if you can learn from somebody else. On the opposite side of OSHW,2 there’s the business benefits. What we found at SparkFun is if we open-source our design, there is a good likelihood that our business competitors will also learn from the design. But what that does is force us to pay attention. It forces us to innovate. It forces us to always be thinking about the next product. Over the past two or three years, that has caused this great effect within SparkFun to streamline, to get really fast and good at coming out with new versions, and new features, and new products. So I find open-source hardware to be really beneficial from both a humanity stance and a business stance.
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